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After 2006, 650 miles of fortifications were constructed along the land portion of the US-Mexico border. The walls and fences had little or no demonstrable impact on US national security, drug trafficking, or undocumented immigration. Instead they caused immense environmental damage, disrupted life and trade along the borderline, and imposed a military-style occupation and detention ‘gulag’ upon border communities. The ‘twin cities’ that straddle the border represent a ‘third nation’ with more than 10 million residents and where over a billion dollars of binational trade crosses daily. The occupied third nation is now threatened by further fortifications that will seal the entire 2,000-mile border at a cost of $25 billion. An architecture and urbanism of occupation is instrumental in achieving this goal, which is roundly opposed by the majority of third nation dwellers.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with BENEDIKT KORF.

MICHAEL DEAR is Professor Emeritus in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London. His graduate education was at University College London and the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Berkeley in 2009, he worked for two decades at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His most recent book, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide was awarded the Globe Prize for ‘Geography in the Public Interest’ from the Association of American Geographers. His latest edited volume, entitled Geohumanties: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place focused on emerging transdisciplinary intersections among geography, environmental design and the humanities. He is currently curating an exhibition entitled ‘Art of the California-Mexico Border’ at the Richmond Center for the Arts.

BENEDIKT KORF is a geographer and freelance consultant in international development. Completing his PhD and a research fellowship at the Chair of Resource Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he has been a lecturer in geography at the University of Liverpool. Since 2007 he is Assistant Professor at the department Department of Geography, University of Zurich.

The talk looks on the examples of how law and regimes of managements have a capacity to enclose space, in order to propose a new site of design intervention that could counter these tendencies.

DUBRAVKA SEKULIĆ is an architect and researcher focusing on the topics of transformation of public domain in the contemporary cities, commons and spatial justice, and spatial implications of neoliberal planning. Dubravka exhibited and lectured about her work across the globe, including at aut.innsbruck (AT), Stroom, the Hague (NL), Superfront, Los Angeles (USA), AA, London (UK). She graduated architecture at Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, where she was a lecturer. She was an East European Exchange Network fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and a design researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

How can Architecture include living nature as a constitutive element—and not as a simple decoration? How can architecture dialogue with the unpredictable and uncanny presence of nature? Can the inclusion of living nature inside architecture seriously contribute to reverse Climate Change (reducing air pollution, absorbing CO2 and increasing living species biodiversity)? Should we consider a kind of a non—anthropocentric urban ethic?

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with ANNE LACATON.

STEFANO BOERI was born in Milan in 1956, and is the founding partner of Stefano Boeri Architetti. He earned a master’s degree in Architecture from Polytechnic University of Milan and a PhD in architecture in 1989 from Iuav University of Venice. Stefano Boeri was the editor-in-chief of the international magazine Domus from 2004 to 2007 and Abitare from 2007 to 2011. He is the professor of urban planning at Polytechnic University of Milan. He has been visiting professor in many international Universities as GSD Harvard Graduate School of Design, Berlage Institute, Columbia University. From 2013 he is also the artistic director of MI/ARCH, an international festival of architecture promoted by the Politecnico Di Milano.

ANNE LACATON born in 1955 is one of the principals of Lacaton & Vassal Architectes, based in Paris, France. She graduated from the School of Architecture, Bordeaux in 1980, and obtained a Diploma in Urban Planning at the University of Bordeaux in 1984. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Madrid, Master Housing (2007-13); Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL Lausanne) in 2004, 2006 and 2010-11; University of Florida, Ivan Smith Studio in 2012; University of NY-Buffalo, Clarkson Chair in 2013; Pavillon Neu ize OBC-Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2013-14; Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) : Kenzo Tange 2011 & Design Critic 2015. Since 2017 she is also Associate Professor of Architecture & Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), based in Zurich, Switzerland.

LANDSCAPES FOR PROFIT, LANDSCAPES FOR LIFE
26.03.2018Raquel Rolnik with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

In contemporary cities, global finance has taken over land
and built space, submitting forms and uses to the logic, rythms
and culture of rent seeking capital. “Landscapes for profit”
correspond to real estate financial products which develop
over, destroying and displacing existing living places.
The lecture will retrieve the political economy of financialization
of urban space as well as the corresponding resistance
movements. Using examples of different cities in the world,
both in the north and in the south, and adopting
a historical perspective, the lecture will try to connect
architectures, forms of tenure and political power to understand
current struggles over the right to the city.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES.

RAQUEL ROLNIK is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, architect and urban planner, with over 35 years of scholarship, activism and practical experience in planning, urban land policy and housing issues. In her career, she has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of the city of São Paulo (1989-1992) and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities (2003-2007) as well as NGO activities, such as Urban Policy Coordinator of the Polis Institute (1997-2002). In 2008 Professor Rolnik was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing for a six years mandate, ending June 2014.

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE–BARTHES is an architect and urban designer. She is involved in research and teaching at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marc Angélil since 2011, and is currently completing a doctoral degree on Food and Territories, with Egypt as case study. She directed the cycle on Egypt (2014-2016) of the MAS in Urban Design, investigating formal and informal urban dynamics of Cairo, and currently direct the MAS Urban Design on Tangier/Marseille.

Urbanism has historically been concerned with cities; only exceptional projects have dealt with territory and the territorial character of urbanisation. The eclipse is introduced as metaphor and method to approach urban territories beyond the city — only when the city itself is eclipsed, can the phenomena unfolding in its “shadow“ be adequately perceived and analysed. To reinvent urbanism in the age of the Anthropocene, a widening of its disciplinary field from cities to urbanising territories is required.

The talk with be introduced by Prof. Philip Urspung, dean of the Faculty of Architecture, ETH Zurich.

MILICA TOPALOVIĆ is an architect, urbanist, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at ETH Zurich. Expanding the traditional focus of urbanism and urban studies, her research expertise is on territory and territorial urbanization beyond the limits of “the city”. She has worked on these themes since 2006, when she joined the ETH Studio Basel and directed urban research programs on international cities and on territories including Havana, Hong Kong and the Nile Valley. From 2011-15 she held research professorship at the Singapore-ETH Centre Future Cities Laboratory, studying the relationship between Singapore and its transnational hinterlands. She has also studied extensively informal urban transformation in Europe and the world. She is the author of Belgrade: Formal/Informal, and is working on the forthcoming book Hinterland: Singapore Beyond the Border. In her ongoing studio series at the ETH Department of Architecture she is conducting a series of investigations on European Countryside.

Atelier Bow-Wow has been working for the project 1K in Katori, Chiba, Japan. K1 is a new timber workshop where everybody can share a workspace together. In this lecture Momoyo Kaijima will explain how to create accessibility of resources through architectural design.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Bas Princen.

MOMOYO KAIJIMA was born in Tokyo in 1969. She received her undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Domestic Science at Japan Women’s University in 1991 and both her graduate (M.Eng.) and post-graduate degrees were from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1994 and 1999. She was also a guest student at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH) from 1996-1997. In 2000 Kaijima became an Assistant Professor, and in 2009 an Associate Professor, at the Art and Design School of the University of Tsukuba. Like Tsukamoto, in 2003 she was a visiting faculty (as a design critic) in the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD and between 2005 and 2007 she was also a guest professor at ETH Zürich. In 2010 she was the Architect in Residence at the University of Auckland. Since 2017 she is Assistant Professor at ETH.

BAS PRINCEN (1975 / NL) is an an artist and photographer living and working in Rotterdam and Zurich. He was educated as industrial designer at the Design Academy Eindhoven and later studied architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Since then, through the use of photography, his work focuses on urban landscape in transformation, researching the various forms, outcomes and imaginaries of changing urban space. At the 2010 Venice Bienale of Architecture, Bas Princen was awarded the Silver Lion for his collaborative work with OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen. In 2004 he won the Charlotte Kohler Prize for promising young artists and architects in the Netherlands.

In the chapter XVI of his Leviathan – Of Persons, Authors and Things personated (1651), Hobbes defines the person as he « whose words and actions are considered, either as his own or as representing the words and actions of another man […] » accordingly delineating two subcategories : that of the natural person – when the words are his own – and that of the artificial person – when these are representing the words and actions of another ; he further states : « Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions ‘owned’ by those whom they represent. And then the person is the ‘actor’, and he that owns his words and actions is the ‘author’, in which case the actor acts by authority – but is not the author […]. So that by authority is always understood a right of doing any act, and ‘done by authority’, done by commission or license from him whose right it is ».

The distinction between authorship and actorship expediently polarizes the paramount questions of the What? and of the How?, of the content and of the form. The point is not to apply a literary notion to some emulative acceptation of its content, but rather to hypothetically submit a conceptual intendment to its potential adequation in the field of architecture ; and as such, Hobbes’ axiomatic statement informs us on the condition of the architect, whose authority is fundamentally a licensed and commissioned one; as the tributary of given programmatic, economic and legal prerequisites and impelled through exogeneous necessities, architecture resolutely assigns its agent to performing a given act in the name and interest of (x) : the architect is a political actor.

FRANÇOIS CHARBONNET studied architecture at the ETH Zurich and collaborated with Terence Riley, Architects in New York (1997-98), Herzog & de Meuron (2000-03), and on a joint venture between Herzog & du Meuron and OMA – Rem Koolhaas (2000-01) before founding Made in with Patrick Heiz in 2003. He has also been a visiting professor at the EPFL Lausanne, ETH Zurich and the University of Lugano in Mendrisio, Switzerland. As of 2017 he is Visiting Professor at the Kyoto Design Lab, Japan.

DANIEL NIGGLI is founding member of the Zurich and Berlin based architectural practise EM2N. Their work has received several awards including ‘bestarchitects’, ‘Umsicht-Regards-Sguardi’, the ‘Auszeichnung Guter Bauten’ from the City of Zurich, the Canton of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft, they received the ‘Swiss Art Award’ in Architecture. Together with his office partner, Matthias Müller, they have been visiting professors at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, as well as in Zurich.

The sequence started the moment that one of the young boys living in the family farm in Touba decided to emigrate to Madrid. At this point, the family matriarch at the farmhouse in Touba called one of the males living in Madrid, an older cousin of the boy. The cousin did not answer his cell phone but, instead, headed to a phone parlor where he could obtain better rates for international calls. There, he called the family matriarch to learn of the next arrival. He asked her to stress the need for the boy to walk all the way to either an African grocery store or a Senegalese restaurant in the Lavapiés district. The plan succeeded and, several months later, the young boy made his way to the African grocery in Lavapiés where he found people who put him in touch with his relative. He then took a place in a shared apartment with his cousin and four other Mouride men. It is important to consider the nature of the urban composition in which this event developed: not a city but a fragmented transnational assemblage. In this urban constellation, built devices – such as the apartments, mosque, phone parlors, African grocery stores, and Senegalese restaurants in Lavapiés – are activated in the urban scene only by interacting with a number of diverse technologies including cell phones, rugs, speakers, online platforms, and money transfer services. This urbanism is not shaped by the city itself – neither by its grid nor by the volumes and spaces its buildings create– but by an association of diverse devices that interact to produce an interscalar ecosystem of heterogeneous entities. Fragments of this constellation can be found in shared spaces collectively constructed in the minds and books of the Mouride believers. These fragments are connected by interaction and the performativity of urban dynamics. They gain continuity when phone calls are made, money transfers are ordered, and the relatives of recent immigrants are informed of arrivals. The urbanism by which the Mouride family is enacted is not fixed but performative. Such an urbanism challenges the ways we think politics is embodied in architecture.

In recent years, this issue has compelled a number of theorists and practitioners to align themselves with one of two positions: techno-determinism or techno-neutrality. The determinists argue that the form of the city and its architectural conditions cause societies to emerge in the ways they do. The neutralists, however, believe that architecture is a neutral actor that can potentially contain any social form. Whereas quantification has been the argument to insistently claim the disconnection of architecture from politics, and even to be the first step towards post-political architectural practices, in the account of the specific cases, quantification does not generate space of convergence and does not provide social coherence. Calculation-made enactments are hosted by different and evolving social demarcations, performed in desynchronized time sequences, and cater to diverse and, in many cases, confronted interests, ideologies, sensitivities, stakes, and programs. Parametric calculation, in these cases, is not providing consensus, nor a post-political society, but rather an urbanism of diverse mathematics.

ANDRÉS JAQUE is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an international practice that explores material politics in the intersection of design, research and activism. He is the youngest recipient of the Frederick Kiesler Prize for the Architecture and the Arts, and he has been awarded with the Silver Lion at the14th Venice Biennale and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize. He is Professor of Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University GSAPP and Visiting Professor at Princeton University SoA.

ANDREAS RUBY is an architectural critic and theorist. From 1999 to 2001 he was editor of the architectural journal Daidalos. He has taught architectural theory and design at the University of Kassel, Cornell University, and the Ecole Polytechnique Féderale in Lausanne. Together with Ilka Ruby he founded the agency Textbild and the publishing house Ruby Press. Since 2016 he is director of the Swiss Architecture Museum.

Traces of the more-than-neoliberal: Comparing urban outcomes through tracing connections

Bringing the more-than-neoliberal into focus requires a move beyond the practice of tracking neoliberal policies and their localisation, observing their transformation and noting that in the process they reinvigorate the global “syndrome” of neoliberalisation. This way, we only ever “see” neoliberalisation. In this paper I will explore how taking a more explicitly comparative approach to tracing connections between places can bring into view elements of urban processes which a policy mobilities perspective notes but doesn’t treat as a basis for wider analytical insights. Thus, important features of urban processes might be viewed as “fellow travellers” or local variation, and assigned to a non-theoretical series of particular observations. Treating connections as a foundation or starting point for comparison can help to build stronger theoretical and political insights concerning a wider range of urban processes.

I have been calling this approach to comparison “genetic”, drawing on the spatiality of the urban itself as grounds for thinking with elsewhere, for a comparative imagination, following the way in which many urban phenomena are repeated across different contexts, emergent from the vast array of interconnected processes which constitute, perhaps, the virtual urban – all the possibilities that might give rise to “any urban whatever” – to paraphrase Maliq Simone. In the presentation I will draw on three cases of city strategies, in Johannesburg, London and Lilongwe, to consider how tracing genetic processes can support practices of comparing across quite different urban contexts. These “grounds” or justifications for comparison based on the interconnections amongst cities are only a starting point. They can direct us to explore how outcomes are “assembled” across an array of transcalar processes and actors which confound local-global distinctions and bring a much wider range of processes into view – beyond neoliberalization. They also need to be seen as part of a wider process of “assembling” a comparator across the diverse elements of cases, wider literature, individual researchers, evidence gathered, interlocutors, and, not least collaborators, residents, practitioners, who have their own productive “wild” comparisons to put into the mix (Guggenheim et al, 2016). Through this methodological tactic I suggest we can not only identify more-than-neoliberal dynamics and outcomes for wider comparative analysis, but also stretch understandings of the assumed forms of global circulations and of urban political agency which underpin analyses of neoliberalization.

JENNIFER ROBINSON completed her undergraduate, Hons and MA studies in Geography at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, followed by a PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge. Before coming to University College, London as Professor of Human Geography, she worked at The Open University (1998-2009), the London School of Economics and Political Science (1996-1998) and at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), Durban, South Africa (1990-1996). She is also active in the Urban Laboratory, a cross-University network for Urban Studies.

CHRISTIAN SCHMID is a geographer, sociologist and urban researcher. Since 1980, he has been active as video activist, organizer of cultural events and urban researcher. In 1999, he became the scientific director of the project Switzerland: An Urban Portrait at the ETH Studio Basel. He holds the Titular Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich.

BENEDIKT KORF is a geographer and freelance consultant in international development. Completing his PhD and a research fellowship at the Chair of Resource Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he has been a lecturer in geography at the University of Liverpool. Since 2007 he is Assistant Professor at the department Department of Geography, University of Zurich.

With the rise of right-wing populist, anti-liberal and authoritarian political alternatives, architecture has also attracted the attention of right-wing ragers. The innocent-sounding word “metapolitics” has become a key term here. The German right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek, for example, uses it to mean the extended field “of words, of thought, of style, of books, magazines, and events, of the habitual and the auratic”—a field that in his view needs fundamentally changing, in the interests of a cultural revolution coming from the right. STEPHAN TRÜBY will give a critical overview of the architectural metapolitics pursued by identitarian and alt-right movements internationally.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with SOMETHING FANTASTIC and CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES.

STEPHAN TRÜBY is professor of architectural and cultural theory at the Technical University of Munich. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London. His academic career has involved stints as visiting professor of architecture at the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design (2007–2009), director of the postgraduate spatial design programme at the Zurich University of the Arts (2009–2014) and lecturer at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University (2012–2014). He was research director of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 and is a regular contributor to the magazine ARCH+.

SOMETHING FANTASTIC is a young architectural practice committed to smart, touching, simple architecture. Its works include publications (Something Fantastic, Building Brazil, e. a.) teaching (ETH Zurich, e.a.) and design for private and institutional clients.

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES is an architect and urban designer. She is involved in research and teaching at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marc Angélil since 2011, and is currently completing a doctoral degree on Food and Territories, with Egypt as case study. She directed the cycle on Egypt (2014-2016) of the MAS in Urban Design, investigating formal and informal urban dynamics of Cairo.

In recent years ARNO BRANDLHUBER’S practice has been dedicated to the idea of legislation in architecture as a main factor for the built environment. This mindset resulted in built and theoretical investigations, such as the ARCH+ issue Legislating Architecture, and the 2016 film Legislating Architecture, made in collaboration with CHRISTOPHER ROTH. The film and its recent second chapter, The Property Drama, will be shown and discussed during the event.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with PATRIK SCHUMACHER and ALEXANDER LEHNERER.

ARNO BRANDLHUBER is an architect and urban planner based in Berlin. In 1992 he started his first practice in Cologne, where he realized numerous projects including the Neanderthal Museum, Kölner Brett and Crystal. Since 2006, he has run the collaborative architectural practice Brandlhuber+, whose recent projects include Brunnenstrasse 9 and Antivill. He holds a professorship at ETH Zurich.

CHRISTOPHER ROTH works as an artist and director. His practice may be best understood as a proactive intellectual scholarship combining the factual and fictitious with both analytic and poetic qualities. Roth’s work seeks to understand how information, words, pictures, and ideas are received, travel, and are mediated at a constantly accelerating pace. His work has been included in several exhibitions and congresses around the world.

PATRIK SCHUMACHER is an architect and architectural theorist based in London. He is the principal of the architecture practice Zaha Hadid Architects and was the lead architect of ZHA’s first completed project – the Vitra Fire Station – and together with Hadid, has co-authored almost all the firm’s built works to date. He is also lecturing worldwide and recently held the John Portman Chair in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

ALEXANDER LEHNERER an architect and urban designer, currently holds a professorship at ETH Zurich. Prior to that he was based in Chicago, where he was a professor at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. His Zurich-based architectural practice, Ciriacidis Lehnerer Architekten, tries to understand architecture as cultural practice by relentlessly exploring urban and architectural conditions – their forms, ingredients, and rules.

There is No More Land, There is Only Sand*
20.08.2017Milica Topalovic at the Johann Jacobs Museum

The process of Singapore’s transformation from a backwater colonial port, predominantly rural, to the new nation of industrial middle class housed in public high rises, was dubbed a “territorial revolution” with many layers: the social, political and economic dimensions of the national territory have been sculpted by the hand of the state, using topography as the main medium.
Singapore also shows that construction of urban land usually doesn’t come without a (vast) hinterland. The city-state is known as the world’s largest importer of sand for construction, as is located at the center of the sand-trade region whose radius extends to South China, Cambodia, and Myanmar. With nearly a quarter of its land area, around 140 square kilometers, added over the years, it has been estimated that three-quarters of this is “built on foreign soil.”

THE CITY AND THE COMMONS—Krokodil and Denkallmend
17.05.2017POOL Architects

ANDREAS SONDEREGGER (Dipl. Arch. ETH/BSA) is one of the co-founders and partners of pool Architekten. He studied architecture at the ETH Zurich and Design of Tall Buildings at the IIT Chicago. In recent years he has held several teaching positions as professor for architecture at the Hochschule Liechtenstein and as guest professor for architecture at the ETH Zurich and TU Vienna. From 2011to 2016 Andreas Sonderegger acted as President of BSA Zurich and is currently a board member of BSA Switzerland. He is co-founder and member of the Architects Group Krokodil and has published several books, including „Glatt! Manifest für eine Stadt im Werden“.

THOMAS FRIBERG (Dipl. Arch. ETH) is an associate at pool Achitekten. After graduating from the ETH Zurich in 2003 he worked on the book „Switzerland – An Urban Portrait“ at Studio Basel. He gained experience at Kräuchi Architekten, Basel and David Chipperfield Architects in London before joining pool Architekten in 2008. He has been leading the competition team there for several years. His interest in commons evolved through his competition entry „Denkallmend“ and the workshop future of Kasernenareal Zurich.

Introduction by:

MARCEL JAEGGI (MSc ETH Arch) is an architect and researcher who studied architecture at ETH Zurich and CEPT Ahmedabad (India). Before joining the ETH Zurich “Architecture of Territory” team of Milica Topalovic in 2011, he has been collaborating with pool Architekten on several projects and was a junior member of the Architects Group Krokodil.

SASCHA DELZ is an architect and researcher working at the intersection of architecture, urban design and urban studies. After collaborating with Diller Scofidio & Renfro in New York he worked as an exhibition designer, design instructor, and researcher at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, and the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. While his PhD investigated urban and rural transformations under the premise of international development cooperation in Ethiopia, he currently collaborates on a research project that explores cooperative housing for low-income contexts. In addition, Sascha directs the seminar Urban Mutations on the Edge, which explores the political economy of urban form within contemporary urbanization processes.

Matthias Winter established Studio Winter with Céline Winter in Zürich in 2016. He studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and graduated in 2014 with Christian Kerez. He has previously worked for Baukuh in Milan and for Made In in Geneva. Recently he is teaching at the chair of Architecture and Design of Christian Kerez. He is co-founder of Delphi, a periodical zine about architecture.

Bárbara Maçães Costa graduated in 2008 from the Univ. of Porto Faculty of Architecture, and in 2013 from the Univ. of Lisbon Faculty of Fine-Arts. Worked for three years as project architect for the landscape office Bureau Bas Smets, and briefly as teaching assistant for the University of Lisbon. She is currently employed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne as a research assistant to Prof. Harry Gugger’s Laboratory Basel, as lecturer of the Teaching Unit U — Cartography, and as a PhD student. Fields of expertise include spatial representation, landscape theory and environmental aesthetics.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect and urban designer. She is involved in research and teaching at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marc Angélil since 2011, and is currently completing a doctoral degree on Food and Territories, with Egypt as case study. She directed the cycle on Egypt (2014-2016) of the MAS in Urban Design, investigating formal and informal urban dynamics of Cairo.

Charlotte studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Marseille and at the Technische Universität in Vienna. She obtained in 2008 a Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at the ETH. She has lectured and taught workshops at the Architectural Foundation in London, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the University of Ss. Cyrill and Methodius in Skopje, the University of Seville, Hong-Kong University, ZhdK, FCL Singapore, and with the AA Visiting School in Alexandria, Egypt.

She is co-editor of Housing Cairo-The Informal Response and The Book, The School, The Town, with Prof. Dr. Marc Angéli and Something Fantastic (2016, 2013, Ruby Press), and published numerous articles in various magazines including AD, San Rocco, TRANS. Works of the MAS which she curated have been exhibited at the Bi-City Biennale in Shenzhen, at the Egyptian Pavilion of the Venice Bienale and at the constellation.s exhibition at arc-en-rêve, Bordeaux.

“Everything shaped by humans is culture; this includes the entire territory. Cultured landscapes are created by the constant interaction of humans with nature. Their regional characteristics are due to natural conditions and increase with growing technological development. With this holistic concept of the Kulturlandschaft built as well as non-built areas can be considered as ONE continuous culturally shaped landscape. Michael Wagner will present some hands-on strategic designs that have been developped within the research platform Kulturlandschaft at the chair of Prof. Kees Christiaanse to allow insights for possible context-sensitive and long-term transformation strategies and to open up the discussion about the future identity of a sustainable Kulturlandschaft in Switzerland.”

Michael Wagner (Dipl. Arch. ETH/SIA) is senior assistant and lecturer for urban design at the ETH Zürich, University of Zurich, University of Lichtenstein and held a visiting professorship ‘Agenda Lehre’ at the Technical University of Munich in summer 2014. At the Chair of Prof. Kees Christiaanse he is leading the research platform Kulturlandschaft. After being project leader in different architecture and urban design offices in Zurich over several years, he’s now leading the office Wagner Vanzella Architekten in Zürich together with Raphael Vanzella. His fields of interest include the capacity for regeneration of urban territories, land use negotiation processes and their results on spatial and urban design, as well as the creation of synergies by coordinating issues of settlement, infrastructure, energy production, and landscape for the development of sustainable, medium-density urban territories. His special interest applies to transdisciplinary cooperations and the close interconnection of design, research and current practice.

Comparing the contextual effect of city-state-like global cities, Shin Alexander Koseki argues that cities are spatial options historically constituted by their actors and show to produce specific political and economical practices. They are in that sense distinctive milieux of social and spatial conditions, affording a certain potential that does not emerge from other forms of territorial spatial options.

Shin Alexandre Koseki is a Canadian and Japanese architect, urban planner and researcher in urban theory, political geography and spatial planning. After having studied architecture in Canada and in Switzerland, Koseki specialized in spatial planning and urban sciences at EPFL-Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (MSc in 2010, PhD in 2017). Previously, he has held positions as associate researcher and lecturer at the EPFL School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (2010–2016), as well as visiting fellow at the School of Anthropology of the University of Oxford, the Cities Research Cluster of the National University of Singapore, and the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Center. In 2013, he was a studio director for the EPFL MSc Minor in Spatial and Urban Planning, and from 2015 to 2016, he was responsible for the organization and coordination of two international PhD summer schools on urban complexity and cognition offered conjointly by EPFL and ETH Zurich. As an architect, Koseki has worked in Japan, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 2008, he sojourned at the Académie de France à Rome—Villa Medici as a guest of then director Richard Peduzzi and has since continued to develop a practice as a photographer and a set designer, mostly for contemporary dance and performance art.

BAS PRINCEN is an artist and photographer. He studied industrial design and architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Through photography, his has focused on urban landscape in transformation often portraying the tension between the built and the imaginary.
His solo exhibitions include Breuer Revisited at the MET Breuer in 2017, Room of Peace at Fundamentals, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, and Refuge at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2010. His books include Artificial Arcadia in 2004, Five Cities Portfolio in 2009 and Reservoir in 2011. Princen won the 2004 Charlotte Kohler Prize for young artists in the Netherlands and the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010.

Adrian Lahoud’s research sets out a philosophical, scientific architectural history of scale as a problematic, drawing on case studies of postwar urban planning, territorial governance and climate modelling. His research project on the Mediterranean Sea investigates the possibility of reestablishing the role of this ocean as a unifying territory in the age of the anthropocene.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Marc Angélil and Emily Eliza Scott.

ADRIAN LAHOUD is an architect, researcher, and educator. Prior to being appointed Dean of the School of Architecture and Head of the Architecture program at the Royal College of Art, Lahoud was Director of the Urban Design Masters at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and served as Director of the MA programme at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. He received his PhD from the University of Technology Sydney, where he taught for a number of years while running an award winning architectural practice.

MARC ANGÉLIL is professor and former dean of the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich. His research at the Network City and Landscape and the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore focuses on social and spatial developments of large metropolitan regions world wide. He is the author of several books and has also taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He practices architecture with his partners at ‘agps’ in Los Angeles and Zurich.

EMILY ELIZA SCOTT is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist focused on contemporary art and design practices that engage pressing ecological and/or geo-political issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. Currently postdoctoral fellow in the architecture department at ETH Zürich, she teaches on subjects ranging from the concept of ‘post-nature’ to contemporary architecture ‘in the expanded field’ to the emergent geographies climate change.

The Intermundia research project questions alternating border-scapes of trans-European and intra-European migration. The project started with depicting the case of Lampedusa as a metonym of contemporary detention conditions at the entry point to the Fortress Europe. Lampedusa serves as a textbook example of an erased space arising at geopolitical crossroads, where socially and institutionally marginalized communities are being formed. Instead of observing the island of Lampedusa as consolidated institution of ‘the waiting room’, a jailed zone in the middle of conflict, Intermundia attempts a post-human perspective in order to investigate the ambivalent state of ‘in-betweenness’ and the (im)possibilities of cultural translation.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Dubravka Sekulić, IZK TU Graz.

ANA DANA BEROŠ is an architect, curator, editor and educator focused on creating environments that catalyze social change. Co-founder of ARCHIsquad – Division for Architecture with Conscience and educational programs Urgent Architecture. Interest in architectural theory and experimental design led her to co-found Think Space and Future Architecture platforms. Her project Intermundia was finalist for the Wheelwright Prize and received a Special Mention at the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale. Currently, she is one of the Actopolis curators, a project that is establishing a transnational test field for urban alternatives extending from Mardin on the border with Syria via Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sarajevo and Zagreb to Oberhausen.

DUBRAVKA SEKULIĆ is an architect and researcher focusing on the topics of transformation of public domain in the contemporary cities, commons and spatial justice, and spatial implications of neoliberal planning. Dubravka exhibited and lectured about her work across the globe, including at aut.innsbruck (AT), Stroom, the Hague (NL), Superfront, Los Angeles (USA), AA, London (UK). She graduated architecture at Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, where she was a lecturer. She was an East European Exchange Network fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and a design researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Hinterland: Scale, Urbanisation and Planning of Territory Beyond the City
24.11.2016Milica Topalovic

Throughout history, cities have functioned as centres of political and economic power, from which the agricultural and resource-rich hinterlands were controlled. From the nineteenth century onward, new technologies, transportation modes and the opening of new trade routes have introduced a widening of distances and a remarkable complexity to the relationship between cities and their productive hinterlands—hinterlands have continued to expand, globalise and ‘disintegrate’, both as distinct territorial entities and as legible objects of governance or study.

The transnational hinterland archipelago that supports Singapore can be described as an “invisible” territory in the shadow of the dazzling city-state. In contrast to standard representations of cities as self-propelled economic powerhouses, the project revels the landscapes and spaces of food, water, energy, sand, and labor-power that support the globally strategic urban centre. Instead of the city-state, the project proposes the cross-border metropolis as the new urban paradigm for Singapore.

On the Opacity of World Trade
31.10.2016Said To Contain: artist collective

Said to contain is the contract-term used by shipping companies to accept containers for transport without verifying their contents. SAID TO CONTAIN: is also the title of a performance project initiated by Laura Kalauz, Maja Leo and Bojan Djordjev in 2013 in collaboration with Neue Dringlichkeit.

The Opacity of World Trade event will take the form of a performative lecture, where the audience will move between three performance spaces. This will be followed by a conversation with a special guest in the main lecture hall.

Piercing the opaque shell of global capitalism SAID TO CONTAIN: looks at how the production, consumption and flow of goods shape our way of being, thinking and living. In March and April 2016 the artists shipped themselves from Hamburg to Buenos Aires on a cargo ship following the logistics supermachine for 23 days. During May and June 2016 they set up a cargo container in Zurich as an anchor for dialogue and performative production of knowledge, the Thinking Public Sessions. SAID TO CONTAIN: hosts Thinking Public Sessions with different actors of global trading, such as logistic workers and economic students and investigates ways to articulate research on global trade into discursive performative formats.

BOJAN DJORDJEV is a theatre maker based in Belgrade, Serbia.

LAURA KALAUZ is a theatre maker and choreographer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

CHRISTOPHER KRIESE is a theatre maker and lecturer for performative arts based in Zurich, Switzerland.

MAJA LEO is a theatre maker and curator based in Zurich, Switzerland and Hamburg, Germany.

MIRIAM WALTER KOHN is a theatre maker and producer based in Zurich, Switzerland.

NEUE DRINGLICHKEIT (nD) is a Zurich-based art and performance collective. Within their work they perform a constant shift between the spheres of „arts“, „politics“ and „life“. Their works have been shown at Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014); ifa-Gallery, Stuttgart (2016); Favoriten Theater Festival, Dortmund (2014); Gessnerallee Zürich et al.

Invisible Lines and Liquid Mass: The Urbanisation of the Sea
17.10.2016Nancy Couling

Urbanization processes unfolding in ocean space display systems of order distinct from land. They exploit the ocean’s fluidity by prioritizing movement and maintaining flows, they often resist territorial claims, occupy invisible sub-surface zones, are periodic and porous. Therefore they are unfamiliar in urban terms. The sea itself is a highly differentiated, contingent spatial mass. This combination represents a huge challenge to design as vast offshore areas are being occupied and planned. The lecture will discuss the properties of the urbanized ocean, drawing on examples of architectural strategies and interventions which lead to an understanding of the architect’s role in this emerging field.

The urbanization of the sea is an ongoing research project that began with the Barents Sea investigation at Professor Harry Gugger’s EPFL Laboratoire Bâle (laba).

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Professor Christian Schmid.

NANCY COULING is an architect who has recently completed her doctoral thesis The Role of Ocean Space in Contemporary Urbanization, with Professor Harry Gugger at laboratoire bâle (laba), an architecture and urban design studio of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), based in Basel, Switzerland (2015). This research revealed the specificities of the ocean as an urbanized realm, using the Barents and Baltic Seas as two case-studies. At laba, Nancy Couling researched and coordinated the Barents Sea project (2011/12) for Masters students, which was published in the award-winning Barents Lessons—Teaching and Research in Architecture, co-edited with Harry Gugger and Aurelie Blanchard (Park Books, 2013). Before moving to Switzerland in 2010, Couling was founding partner of the interdisciplinary practice cet-0/cet-01 in Berlin (1995-2010) and taught in the Department of Urban Design, Chair Prof. Klaus Zillich at the Technische Universität Berlin (1999-2005) at both Bachelor and Master levels. Nancy Couling studied architecture at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, graduating with honours and later received a one-year scholarship to study at the Università Iuav di Venezia. She has also gained international experience in architecture practices in Italy, Germany, Hong Kong and Australia.

The Sahrawi refugee camps, located in southern Algeria close to the border with the Western Sahara give us an opportunity to question the predominant notions connected to refugee camps. An urbanistic and architectural reading of these camps—established 40 years in the middle of the Sahara—shows how these spaces have developed into a political project of the refugees. Instead of seeing the camps as a spatial manifestation of the state of exception, the Sahrawi camps, governed by the refugees themselves, not only allow for a process of social emancipation, but also prefigure the state still denied to them. The camps in fact, act as a laboratory for how the concept of the nation-state can be reformulated in the 21st century.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Samia Henni.

MANUEL HERZ studied at the RWTH Aachen, and the Architectural Association in London. After teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam and Harvard Graduate School of Design he was head of the teaching and research at ETH Studio Basel – Institute of the Contemporary City. After a visiting professorship at the ETH Zürich 2012-2014, he has been appointed professor of architecural and urban design at the University of Basel. Besides his work as a practicing architect he researches and publishes on the relationship between architecture and nation building, and on refugee camps. His books include ‘From Camp to City – The Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara’ (Lars Müller Publishers) and ‘African Modernism – Architecture of Independence’ (Park Books Publishers).

SAMIA HENNI was born in Algiers, Algeria. She graduated from the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland. She has also studied at the Ecole Polytechnique d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme, Algiers, Algeria and the ex-Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2014, she was a Guest Researcher at Curatorial Knowledge, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom. Currently, she is a Ph.D. fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Department of Architecture (D-ARCH), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. Her doctoral dissertation explores French military spatial operations (territorial/architectural) and psychological actions (textual/ visual) in Algeria during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62).

C.A.Doxiadis and Planning in the Network Era
04.05.2016Panayotis Tournikiotis

CONSTANTINOS DOXIADIS is one of the preeminent figures of 20th century city and regional planning. He designed more than forty new cities around the world based on his vision of the emerging global city, ecumenopolis. His planning theory, ekistics, founded upon the intersection of criticism against modern town planning and the study of ancient Greek cities, aimed to propose a radically new approach to urban and regional planning.PANAYOTIS TOURNIKIOTIS is the professor of architectural theory at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture. He has studied architecture, town planning, geography and philosophy in Athens and Paris. His research focus on critical history and theory, and the way understanding the past may contribute to the interdisciplinary setting of design strategies in architecture and town planning. He has authored and edited many books including Adolf Loos, The Parthenon and its Impact in Modern Times, The Historiography of Modern Architecture, Architecture in Modern Times, and The Diagonal of Le Corbusier. He has been active as a curator in architectural events and he contributes on the board of many institutions. His recent work explores the legacy of Le Corbusier in Greece and the reinvention of the city centre in metropolitan Athens.

‘What human beings need is not utopia but entopia’, C. A. Doxiadis

*Entopia: place that is practicable—that can exist, from the Greek word en and topos, ‘in’ and ‘place’. Term coined by Doxiadis, and discussed in his book Between Dystopia and Utopia, 1966.

Bas Princen will show and discuss three distinct photographic projects to depicting landscape in post-war Europe: Paysages Photographies by Mission Photographique de la DATAR, Luigi Ghirri’s Atlante and his own photographic work on Dutch landscape.

BAS PRINCEN is an artist and photographer. He studied industrial design and architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Through photography, his has focused on urban landscape in transformation often portraying the tension between the built and the imaginary.
His solo exhibitions include Room of Peace at Fundamentals, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, and Refuge at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2010. His books include Artificial Arcadia in 2004, Five Cities Portfolio in 2009 and Reservoir in 2011. Princen won the 2004 Charlotte Kohler Prize for young artists in the Netherlands and the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010.

Despite the traditionalists’ romantic projections and insitutional attempts for preservation, the Greek province has taken its own peculiar course of modernization in the post-war years. The dissemination of various modernisms (tools, materials and construction techniques) appears to have occured somewhat in the absence of an overaching frame of modernity (i.e. the European model of the welfare-state). Over the years, this generated innumerable hybrid forms of anonymous architecture that oscillate between the urban and the rural; contemporary idioma and particularities that stand beyond the previous definitons of a strictly local “tradition” and perhaps require the acknowledgement of a new “genius loci”.

NIKOS MAGOULIOTIS studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He is currently attending the Inter-Departmental Postgraduate Programme: Architectural Design – Space – Culture at NTUA. He is interested in architectural theory and history, as well as their intertwinement with socio-political history, anthropology, folkloristics, etc. He is currently working on the publication of articles, both in Greece and abroad, as well as his MSc thesis titled The Modern-Greek Maison Dom-ino, as an Example of Contemporary Vernacular Architecture.

The lecture presents the history of planning in Greece, investigating the link between urban/architectural policies, territorial management and peri-urban sprawl. Starting from the mid-19th century, the presentation attempts to study the construction of an ideological and political framework within which the myth of the Greek landscape and its ruins contributed to a particular understanding of scale and power.

PLATON ISSAIAS is an architect. He studied architecture in Greece and he holds an MSc from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft. His thesis investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. He is currently a Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, running ADS7 together with Godofredo Pereira and David Burns. Prior to the RCA, he taught at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam and since 2012 in the MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett.

In the frame of the symposium on Contemporary Urban Design Education, Milica Topalovic will speak at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The symposium seeks to clarify how teaching and research methodologies can have a relevance and impact on urban practices and design.

In the frame of the 2016 History Theory+Practice seminar at the Milan Polytechnic, Milica Topalovic will present a lecture. Architecture of Territory dedicates its work to forms and processes of territorial urbanisation, arguing for the necessity of architect engagement at territorial scales.

Architecture of Territory dedicates its work to forms and processes of territorial urbanisation, arguing for the necessity of architect engagement at territorial scales. Since 2011 Milica Topalovic has been attached to the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, studying the region’s hinterlands. With their return to Zurich, Topalovic and her team initiate a new phase of research on European countrysides.

Aglaia Konrad has developed a distinct manner of photography since the 1990s that documents the rapidly advancing process of global urbanisation. Her archive, which encompasses several thousand images of urban infrastructures and housing architectures, offers an unlimited repository that sheds a unique light on the relationship between society and space.

Boris Sieverts began his professional engagement with the territorial scale as a tour guide, conducting walking tours along the outskirts of large cities and urban agglomerations. Currently, his expertise in reading urban landscapes is sought after by those in the planning field as well as in participatory practice and activism. Sieverts will show a selection of tours and projects that he has been involved in over the last 20 years. What, or where, are the limits of understanding the urban through pure experience? And why does such understanding imply responsibility?

Within the context of the Padiglione Architettura at the Milan 2015 EXPO Belle Arti, the symposium Geo-graphical Urbanism—Design and the Formation of the Earth’s Surface in the Age of Planetary Urbanization aims to frame an understanding of design and its agency as the making of synthetic geo-graphies. Milica Topalovic, with her lecture Eclipse: Urbanism Beyond the City, will speak about the methods and themes of her territorial investigations and projects, including section through Italy, Nile Valley and Singapore’s hinterlands.

Philippe Rekacewicz is a journalist and geographer cartographer for Le Monde diplomatique. Interested in geopolitics, sociocultural territories, public and private space, in his work he brings together issues of concern shared by cartography, art, and politics. Since 1988 Rekacewicz has published more than 2000 original thematic maps, 15 atlases, many articles on cartographic visions of the world, and contributed to exhibitions on cartography and art.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Christian Schmid and Marc Angelil, ETH Zurich.

“The point of departure is a film by Christian Schocher, produced in 1979 and which had its premiere in 1981. At the time, the film was a sensation – at least for the few who saw it. The limited audience and showings were not surprising for a black-and-white film over three hours long, in which a man drives through the country and not much else happens. Yet this is a historic film because it captured, for the first time, an essential trend of contemporary Switzerland: the complete urbanisation of society.”(1)

Christian Schmid, geographer and professor of sociology at the D-ARCH ETH Zurich, will use Travelling Warrior to present his groundbreaking work on the problematic of planetary urbanisation.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Matthew Gandy, UCL.

Singapore: An Island or Part of a Metropolitan Region?
06.03.2015Milica Topalovic

As an island, does Singapore have a hinterland?

The tour of the Architecture and Territorial Planning exhibits challenges the concept of Singapore as an island through the exploration of its hinterlands.

At first glance, the island city-state of Singapore is the city without a hinterland. Certainly, it is a city whose production grounds and access to resources lie beyond national borders. Singapore’s geographical hinterland now comprises the tri-national space that includes the Malaysian State of Johor and Indonesian Riau Archipelago. The economic incorporation of proximate areas in Malaysia and Indonesia has remained both a necessity and a profitable opportunity for Singapore.

The hinterland research is founded on extensive field investigations and studio work carried out by the professorship and students of the ETH Department of Architecture since 2011. Our cross-border expeditions in Singapore, Johor and Riau enabled a collection of many original case studies, which together form an alternative portrait of the city-state. The research does not reinforce the accustomed view of Singapore as an island developed on the paradigm of a global city, but as a city whose present and future are tied to the tri-national metropolitan region. Beyond the specific case, the research is a rich source for redefining the notion of the hinterland at the start of the twenty first century.

RITA PADAWANGI is a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University (NUS), with research interests spanning over the sociology of architecture, social movements and participatory urban development.

HEENA PATEL is the executive director of The Island Foundation. Prior to this, Heena’s career included managing projects in Central Asia and Central America at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), advising at the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the United States Fish & Wildlife Service.

SASCHA ROESLER is an architect and researcher working at the intersection of architecture, ethnography and science studies. He’s currently leading a research project at the FCL on venting systems and urban mass housing in Singapore and Medan.
SEA REGION is a research and design studio project dedicated to the common vision for the sea and coastal areas of the Singapore, Johor and Riau Archipelago. It is carried out at the FCL Singapore with students of ETH Zurich.

KERSTEN GEERS graduated in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Ghent, Belgium and at the Esquela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid, Spain. Together with David Van Severen he founded OFFICE – Kersten Geers David Van Severen in 2002. He lectured at different universities and is currently professor at the EPFL, Lausanne (CH). He is a founding member of the architecture magazine San Rocco.

BAS PRINCEN is a photographer with a background in architecture and design for public space. Today, his photography is not only informed by architecture but also by an awareness of human relationships to both built and natural environments. His artistic practice has also involved plotting ecological changes as well as the impacts of urban developments on the Dutch landscape.

SEA REGION is a research and design studio project dedicated to the common vision for the sea and coastal areas of the Singapore, Johor and Riau Archipelago. It is carried out at the FCL Singapore with students of ETH Zurich.

Milica Topalovic will speak on ‘Constructed Land – Singapore 1924-2012’ and focus on comparing the topographic changes of Singapore between this two moments in time and the implications of this territorial transformation.

Milica Topalovic has been D-ARCH Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore since 2011. In 2006 she joined the ETH Zurich as head of research at the eth Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute and the professorial chairs held by Roger Diener and Marcel Meili, where she taught research studios focusing on cities and territories such as Hong Kong and the Nile Valley. Topalovic graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade and received her Master’s degree from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

Since 2000 her work has spanned different scales and media, extending from urban research and design, to architecture and spatial installation. Milica Topalovic has been D-ARCH Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore since 2011. In 2006 she joined the ETH Zurich as head of research at the eth Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute and the professorial chairs held by Roger Diener and Marcel Meili, where she taught research studios focusing on cities and territories such as Hong Kong and the Nile Valley. Topalovic graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade and received her Master’s degree from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Since 2000 her work has spanned different scales and media, extending from urban research and design, to architecture and spatial installation. Milica Topalovic has been D-ARCH Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore since 2011. In 2006 she joined the ETH Zurich as head of research at the eth Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute and the professorial chairs held by Roger Diener and Marcel Meili, where she taught research studios focusing on cities and territories such as Hong Kong and the Nile Valley. Topalovic graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade and received her Master’s degree from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Since 2000 her work has spanned different scales and media, extending from urban research and design, to architecture and spatial installation.